“Marell Evans is what college football should be all about.”

It’s a proclamation about as powerful as the 6-foot-3, 237-pound linebacker.

Yet, in a college football world where headlines are littered with scandal and crime, his story sounds nothing like college football at all.

It’s a story of a young man who has been given nothing in life, yet he’s taken away from it more than those who have it all; a story of a Virginia boy who's back in Ann Arbor to leave as a Michigan Man.

So when Zac Hayden, Marell’s high school defensive coordinator, says Marell is what college football is all about, he’s not just talking about what Marell does on the field. He’s talking about the journey of a 22-year-old man who was willing to do whatever it took to do what was right.

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At Varina High School in Richmond, Va., it didn’t take long for Hayden to notice that Marell Evans was a special football player.

“He was one of the best high school football players I’ve ever coached,” Hayden said.

Considering who he’s coached, that’s no small statement. In Marell’s senior year, Varina sent nine players to Division-I schools. Former Michigan running back Brandon Minor graduated from Varina in 2006 — a year before Marell.

Since 1995, the Blue Devils have won eight regional championships and “14 or 15 district championships,” according to Gary Chilcoat, the Varina head coach for nine of those years.

But for Marell, his talent meant nothing if he didn’t have the guidance to help use it in the best way possible. If he was going to make it to the next level, he couldn’t do it alone.

He lost his father to drugs when he was six. No one in his family had graduated high school, let alone college. He needed people at school to push him, to let him know that he could do it.

That’s exactly what Hayden and Chilcoat did.

Hayden, who was still only a few years out of college during Marell’s tenure at Varina, was more than just a coach.

“Man, we were real close,” Hayden said. “The direction I try to give Marell, and I try to do this for everybody I coach and I learned this from Coach Chilcoat, is to be a father figure to these young men. Be a character guy. Teach them how to do things the right way.

“Be the stability in the storm when they’ve got things going on and they need help.”

Hayden was the stability, and oftentimes, Chilcoat brought the storm.

“I was the hard-ass on the staff because I’m an older person,” the 61-year old Chilcoat said. “They looked to the younger assistants for guidance … people who could understand their situation better than I could.”

Varina’s football program was unlike most high school programs.

“We really demanded a lot from them,” Chilcoat said. “From grades to participating in an offseason program to summer programs to fundraising, we really did a lot.”

By his senior year, Marell was a team captain. At the end of the season, he was named first-team All-State and was the Richmond Times-Dispatch Defensive Player of the Year. He was also an All-District basketball player.

The kid without a father became a big brother to the underclassmen.

“Marell was a full-front leader,” Chilcoat said. “He stepped up, just did whatever we asked of him.”

It wasn’t always a smooth ride — but that was part of what made Marell special.

“He had some bumps along the way, but they were always ironed out pretty easily,” Chilcoat said. “You just have to like those kids that pull themselves up when you don’t have much at home and don’t have much of yourself, and to get out of situations that he’s been in on his own has been pretty remarkable.

“I just really love that trait in him.”

That trait was one of many that helped push Marell to do anything he could to accomplish something no one in his family had ever done.

“It was important to him to get a scholarship and to have an opportunity to play at the college level,” Hayden said. “He did whatever he needed to do to do that. He’d watch film with me. He would always finish every drill harder than he started. He’d study hard. He’d do the things he’d need to do in class. He improved all his grades through his high school career.”

Not only did he graduate — he was academically eligible to accept a scholarship to one of the best academic schools in the nation.

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It was August 2009, and Marell Evans had just announced his decision to leave Michigan.